Candy Clark's Arc

Chapter 1 of 6

Candy Clark pressed the gas again and the Buick's rear tires spun on nothing. Snow packed the wheel wells. The wipers dragged and stuck. Two weeks ago her grandmother died alone in bed, and now Candy was stranded on the same highway her grandmother had warned her about: Route 9 takes people with unfinished business and does not give them back. She had driven the sedan straight from the funeral house toward campus without checking the sky. The heater ticked. Cold pushed through the window seals and touched her knuckles. On the passenger seat sat a stack of gas receipts going back ten years, a folded blanket, and a face-down photo she refused to turn over again. Candy shifted into drive, then reverse, then drive. The tires whined. The car rocked an inch and settled deeper. She killed the engine to save fuel. In the quiet, the radio clicked on by itself and slid from static to a woman humming, then back to static. Thirty feet out, the figure was still there. Gray coat. Hair the wrong length. Standing in snow up to its knees and not shivering. It looked almost like her grandmother from the front. From behind, Candy had already seen, it looked like something wearing her grandmother. She curled her fingers around the rosary in her lap. The beads were warm. The figure turned its face away from the car, the way it always did when she held them. Her hand drifted toward the ignition and stopped. It always stopped when she held the beads. Her grandmother had left three voicemails the week she died. A recipe. Are you eating. I miss you. Candy had listened to none of them until after the funeral. She thought of the recipe now for no reason she could name: cherry, lattice crust, the pie cooling on the counter every time Candy visited as a child. She needed traction. She needed to move before the cabin froze. She looked at the blanket on the passenger seat. Wool. Heavy. The kind her grandmother had wrapped around the rosary as if she'd known. Candy shoved the door open against the drift. Snow bit her face. She dragged the blanket out, knelt at the rear tire, and wedged the wool hard under the rubber. Her fingers went numb in seconds. She kept working. She jammed the receipts in behind it for grip, ten years of her grandmother's driving crushed under one wheel. Back in the driver's seat, she turned the key. The engine caught. She eased the gas. The tire bit the blanket, held, and the Buick lurched forward onto the plowed line of the highway. Her headlights swept a red-and-white sign half-buried in the drift. HIGHWAY 9. The marker sat where she had passed it an hour ago. She had not moved forward at all. In the rearview, the figure was closer.